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Book 3, Chapter 12
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Social Contract, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Human Freedom and Society
Sovereignty, Citizenship, and Direct Democracy
Government and the Separation of Powers
National Longevity and Moral Virtue
Summary
Analysis
Beyond creating a constitution, establishing laws, and setting up a government, the people must meet regularly, in a manner set forth by the law. The stronger (or more active) the government, “the more frequently the sovereign should meet in assemblies.” But when a state is larger than a single town or city, sovereignty can neither be divided among areas, nor “concentrated in” a capital city, because true sovereignty lies in the people itself. While “it is always an evil to unite several towns in one nation,” it is also necessary so that small towns do not get absorbed by larger ones. Rousseau suggests that a large state should periodically “move the seat of government from one place to another,” to ensure that every part of the territory gets “the same abundance and life” and cities do not prosper at the expense of rural areas.
Rousseau makes it clear that citizens’ public assemblies are not only a means to create laws, but also a way of keeping the nation’s heart beating, as it were, by sustaining a culture of civic participation and publicly embodying the sovereign power. When the government is stronger, the sovereign ought to meet “more frequently” in order to exercise proper oversight of the government (which, it bears repeating, works for the sovereign and can be fired at any time). Again, Rousseau is imagining nations on the scale of his native city-state, Geneva, in which it would be logistically possible for all the citizens to meet; now, virtually all nations encompass “several towns.” However, modern nations’ capitals and cities almost always develop more than their rural areas, which shows that Rousseau’s proposal about rotating the seat of power—although impractical—does reflect a real concern about the dangers of unequal concentrations of power within a nation.
Themes
